Repurposing your content for other channels is a great idea. However, a lot of people get it wrong.
They either:
- Try to put their stuff onto every single marketing channel and spread themselves too thin
- Or they offload everything to an AI tool that just churns out a lot of crap.
Sure you’re on every platform with just one click, but all you’re doing is getting in front of people with a gross AI message that helps them know that you’re someone they should ignore.
Because if you can’t be arsed to create the content for them, why should they be bothered to read or watch it?
The good news is there’s a solution to all of this:
In this article I’m going to show you:
- The two-speed traffic technique you can use so you don’t have to be on every marketing channel
- The throat punch principle that makes your content outperform without exhausting you
- And how to use AI to speed up your content repurposing, while actually improving it, and for far less effort
Before we get into the AI nerdiness though, we need to talk about farming and hunting…
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The Two-Speed Traffic Technique
For most of human history, if you wanted to eat, you had to go and hunt something.
Hunting was fast:
- Go out
- Find food
- Bring it home
- Eat
- Etc
But it had one fairly obvious downside because if you stopped hunting, you stopped eating.
Which is why we eventually figured out farming, which was the exact opposite.
It took much longer effort upfront and you had to plant something, look after it, and wait before you got anything back. But once it worked, you had a food source that could keep producing over time.
The clever bit wasn’t choosing one or the other. It was having both.
- Hunt for food now
- While growing something that could feed you later
And I think content marketing should work exactly the same way.
I call this Two-Speed Traffic:
- We need a discovery layer that can get our ideas in front of new people quickly
- And a compounding layer
This way we can get traffic all year round once the content ranks, but we’re also getting bursts of traffic in the meantime so we don’t go hungry while we wait.
With that in mind there are just 3 to 4 channels you need to market on:
Channel #1. You need to be writing blog content on your own platform!
Don’t skip this!
Yes there’s a lot of sexy new platforms out there, but writing content makes it easier for you to learn to communicate with people and form ideas. It’s also the easiest stepping on point for long form content.
Not only that, but its communication at scale.
Even if Google died tomorrow and stopped sending organic traffic, I would still write blog posts, simply because I can share them with people and not have to repeat myself.
For example
Over 6 million people have read my content online, and each article I write is around 30 minutes long…
So if we do the quick math:
30 mins read time X 6 million readers = 3 MILLION HOURS
That’s 342 years!
Yeah, I don’t want to have the same conversation that many times thanks.
Finally, long form content is an asset you own. (Assuming your publishing content to your own blog and not Substack, Medium, Quora, Linkedin or any other nonsense…)
Why your own blog?
Simply because these channels come and go, and accounts can be changed or shut down regardless of if you do the wrong thing, but blog content is yours.
All those other channels can be shut down, but the only way your blog content disappears is if you stop paying for your web hosting.
That being said it is slow to kick in, and you can leverage the size of these other channels, but don’t waste your written stuff there.
Instead, I recommend you use video as your 2nd channel.
Channel #2. YouTube
A lot of bloggers are hesitant to get started on YouTube, but it’s kind of crazy because YouTube has 3 huge benefits going for it:
- First off, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world after Google. So when people search for a topic, they’ll either find your blog, or they’ll find your YouTube videos – assuming you’ve made them
- Secondly, YouTube is a high domain rank platform, so topics you publish on here can rank almost immediately.
- And third, YouTube understands what people like, or might like. Because of this, it can recommend your content to people to watch before they even really know about the topic or ever search for something on it
This means you might create a video around a topic that gets 300 searches a month, but YouTube then shows it to 10,000 people. So far more than the actual demand keyword demand, meaning you can get in front of people earlier than usual.
The best part is that it’s really easy to repurpose your blog content into video.
You can simply:
- Take your article and tweak it slightly into a video script
- Record yourself talking to the camera
- And then use the same images from the article as b-roll in the video, to help edit it
Easy right?
Sure you can get a better impact if you can improve the editing further, and I’ll share how to do that with AI in a second. But the main thing is the message and the topic.
That being said, it can take a while to grow with just long form content, which is why I recommend adding in the next layer.
Channel #3. The video discovery layer
Rather than just push things to a random social media channel, or making images, I recommend picking channels that are actively pushing short form video views like Instagram.
Instagram reels
Why?
Well first off, everyone is on there, but not everyone is on LinkedIn or TikTok.
And secondly, I know I just said it but Instagram is REALLY pushing its short videos right now.
So you can post a 90 second clip on there and see thousands or even millions of views.
This is our hunting channel. Stuff dies off fast but that’s OK, because we can keep showing the same content to new people and scale our audience fast.
Better still?
We don’t even really have to make anything on new topics when we post here. We can simply cut shorter clips from our long form video and publish those.
For example
Let’s say you have a video on SEO backlink methods, and you cover a bunch of techniques.
You could make a short for each technique and post them to Instagram, and then get people intrigued so that they want to learn more, and head across and watch your long form videos.
So the discovery layer then sends people to the long form, helping it get shown more.
Add in ManyChat and you can collect followers and email optins also!
Pretty cool right?
Now normally you would only need one discovery layer, because spending too much time on too many can mean you lose focus. However, I do recommend one more and that’s YouTube shorts for 4 simple reasons.
YouTube shorts
- First of all, you can post the exact same videos as you just did on Instagram. So there’s no extra effort required
- Second, YouTube is also pushing their short videos like crazy. Don’t be surprised if you get 1000 views in an hour on a video
- Third, you can add a ‘related video’ link at the end of a short that sends the viewers directly to the long form video if the click on it
- And 4th, people who watch your short, also get recommended your longform content later on. This alone has increased my longform views by over 65% in just one month of reposting my shorts to YouTube
Crazy right?
Just like that, you now have your two-traffic system in place. You can create the article, record the video and then make the shorts.
And I know what you’re thinking:
“Dan, that sounds like a lot of effort! I’m already struggling to find time for my marketing as it is, this sounds like I need an entire team to do this!”
And I get it.
That overwhelm is the main reason why people are drawn to those shitty AI tools that just grab random things from your content and make 50 versions of all your stuff, with awful, generic AI images.
Yuck.
Please don’t do that for the love of god. It’s just a lot of spam, and it just means the first touch point someone has with your business is bad, so they will ignore you.
You don’t need a team, and you don’t need those shitty one click tools. You can use my techniques instead to get all of this done in just a few hours, but with MUCH HIGHER quality.
How?
Well to understand it, we need to discuss self defence…
The throat punch principle
So, I’ve done martial arts for around 20 years now, and trained all different techniques and styles.
What no one really tells you though, is that one quick punch to the throat is pretty much all you need to survive.
You don’t need to know all the other stuff.
What does this have to do with content marketing?
The key is to look for the throat punch hacks on all your marketing channels. i.e.
“What are the few things that you can do, to be able to get the best results?”
Well lets break it down.
When it comes to writing content:
- You want to pull people in with a before, after, bridge section in the intro. This helps them know they are in the right place and makes them want to keep reading
- You want to write as if talking to one person over coffee. The simpler the better
- Your content should be of high value. Tell them what something is, why it matters, and then show them how to do it
- As long as you hit on these things, you can then use AI to help you write faster
I actually have a process I built that helps me take a 5,000 word article topic that might have taken 8 hours to write in the past, and get it done in around 90 minutes.
The trick is to know and hit the right things, and be the one guiding the tool. This way you’ll get stuff done faster while also not sounding like AI slop.
As for longform video, the throat punches are:
- Topics really matter. It needs to be something important to the audience. You should already have this seeing as you’re making a video version of an article you researched, but it’s worth pointing out
- Then you want a tight, fast introduction. People make lightning quick decisions to stay or go on these platforms so you have to hook them in quickly
- Next you need to keep their attention. Use metaphors, analogies, open loops, and b-roll to help them understand and keep them watching
- Audio matters more than you think. Bad audio will get people to click away fast because its painful to listen to
- But annoyingly, design is a big first impression, and people judge a book by its cover. So if you can add graphics and smooth edits, you’ll get more views and watch time, which will then mean youtube will promote your content far more. This can be the difference between a 100 view video and a 10k view video
And I know what you’re thinking.
That might take another 8 hours to edit, or you would have to offload to an editor at $1k per video. At one per week, you’re looking at around $52k per year or higher!
Here’s the thing though, you don’t have to do that anymore.
For example
I just trained an AI agent on my entire video editing process, and now it edits my videos for me in about an hour, while focusing on those throat punch elements.
It’s actually amazing, and super simple to use.
I record the video, then I click a button in ChatGPT codex (which is free if you have a $20 a month chatgpt plus account).
Then it analyzes my video, removes all the mistakes and errors, and then plans out edits, graphics and b-roll locations.
I then decide which edits I want to use or change, and we mock up designs, focusing on the intro of the video first as that’s the most important part and sets the tone. (Failing to hook means you can lose 70% of the audience almost immediately)
Once I’ve approved what I want, the tool then edits the whole video for me while I can do other things.
At this point, I’ll usually go and upload my article draft from earlier, and by the time I come back, the video is done.
Handy right?
Oh and I forgot to mention, the tool learns from me, so it keeps improving with every new edit.
If you want this system for yourself, it’s part of my ‘Own Your Audience’ program. It’s for solopreneurs and small businesses who want to scale their marketing results, without having to hire or build a team.
It’s not open right now, but you can just the waitlist by the link here and adding your email. Then I’ll send you the details when it goes live.
Anyways, that’s the long form video done, now for the short form.
The throat punch elements for short form video are:
- A ‘moving thumbnail’. Basically some kind of imagery or text to grab their attention right away
- To keep the video short and pull them through, by adding value. What, why, how + show
- Use imagery for context and to keep their attention
- And of course, to optimize it for vertical on mobile devices
Again, that sounds like a lot of effort, and you would be right if you had to do it yourself. Some people even hire specialist social media editors.
Good news for me is I can use my same AI agent from earlier, because it’s been trained to do this also.
I simply tell it to make shorts, and it analyzes the long form video and cross references that against my customers belief map i.e all the things my customers care about.
This way it can pull out sections for shorts that it knows will resonate with my audience, rather than looking for ‘viral’ moments that will attract the wrong people.
Then it does the same editing process:
- It maps out edit suggestions and tweaks,
- Asks me to confirm or change anything,
- And then does a mock up before making the thing for me if I request it
And just like before, it learns from my shorts editing choices, so it improves while saving me a whole bunch of time, or having to hire editors for thousands of dollars per year.
And that's it!
This might seem like a lot because we’re making content for 4 channels, but its actually pretty fast and easy:
- Everything flow down from the one idea
- My AI writing assistant helps to write the article
- The article gets tweaked slightly and becomes the video script
- The AI agent edits the video
- Then it pulls out multiple ideas and makes short form videos for social media
What should take a few days, I can get done in a single 8 hour day or shorter. Which is kind of crazy right?
The best part is, the quality is high, the message aligns with what I want to say and what my audience cares about.
It’s not a crappy one click solution. But it is done faster and easier.
Make sure to give it a try with your own content.